MORGAN COUNTY
The Madison-Morgan Cultural Center (MMCC) will hold a formal opening of the John Lewis Series at 2 p.m. this Sunday (Feb. 18), featuring a powerful exhibit by Morgan County native Benny Andrews, who died in November 2006.
The exhibit, comprised of 17 mixed media paintings on loan to MMCC by the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta, depicts the life of the late U.S. Congressman John Lewis, as well as the Civil Rights Movement.
The John Lewis Series was one of Andrews’ final bodies of work. Andrews, an acclaimed artist and activist born in 1930 in a Morgan County sharecropper's cabin, became friends with Lewis when both were young men in Atlanta.
“They were country boys, and they were reared up in the segregated South and they just clicked and became friends,” said Andrews’ sister, Shirley Andrews Lowrie.
Lewis spoke at Andrews’ funeral, both at Plainview Baptist Church in Morgan County and at Cooper Union College in New York. “I loved Benny Andrews,” the late congressman said at the Union Cooper service.
“I loved him because he was real. He was not shadows. He was not hazy memories or a misty fog of secrets. He was as real and steady as the red clay hills of Georgia, as real as the deep, chocolate earth of a fertile land.”
Andrews’ paintings previously appeared in John Lewis in the Lead: A Story of the Civil Rights Movement, by Jim Haskins and Kathleen Benson, a prize-winning book published in 2006.
The MMCC exhibit opening will begin at 2 p.m. Sunday with remarks from Randy Latimer, nephew of Andrews. Mark Karelson, curator of the exhibit, and Lance Wheeler, Civil and Human Rights Museum, will also speak, as will Jerrick Lewis, nephew of John Lewis and executive director of the John R. Lewis Legacy Institute.
The exhibit was opened for public view in conjunction with the Center’s ambitious permanent Andrews Family Legacy Exhibit in October 2023.
The Andrews Family Legacy Exhibit honors the life and contributions of the Andrews family including the works of Benny, noted author Raymond Andrews, and father George Andrews, a renowned folk artist.
“Through drawings, paintings, and written stories, the Andrews of Morgan County chronicled the pains and pleasures of growing up Black in the rural, segregated American South,” curator Martina Dodd said at the opening of the Andrews exhibit.
Wheeler, who attended the Andrews exhibit, said the National Center for Civil and Human Rights was pleased to offer the John Lewis Series to the Center in conjunction with the Andrews exhibit.
“We miss the collection,” Wheeler said, “but we understand this collection is not meant to be stored.”
Following the program, visitors will be encouraged to tour the John Lewis Series exhibit and the Andrews Family Legacy Exhibit.
Refreshments will be served in the Center’s Arts and Crafts Room at 3:30 p.m.